The Tale of the Fox (French: Le Roman de Renard, German: Reinecke Fuchs) was stop-motion animation pioneer Ladislas Starevich's first fully animated feature film. It is based on the tales of Renard the Fox. Although the animation was finished in Paris after an 18-month period (1929-1930), there were major problems with adding a soundtrack to the film. Finally, funding was given for a German soundtrack by the National Socialist regime (Goethe had written a classic version of the Renard legend) and this version had its premiere in Berlin in April 1937.

Released eight months before Disney's Snow White, it is the world's sixth-ever animated feature film (and the second to use puppet animation, following The New Gulliver from the USSR). The film was released in France with a French language soundtrack in 1941; this is the version which is currently available on DVD.

I attended MistyTang's livestream yesterday and got to watch a cute movie called "Un Monstre à Paris," aka "A Monster in Paris." There's two versions, the English dub and the original French, and we watched the latter with subtitles. It's got teeny bits and pieces of "Phantom of the Opera" and little homages to other films such as "La Belle et la Bête" and "King Kong" and a charming cast (for the most part. The chat booed whenever the annoying waiter showed up. XD), including the titular monster who is a giant flea and his only dialogue is in song during the film's musical numbers. He's so cute and timid and sweet! (And the chat squeed with me, of course) And his voice is gorgeous in French. Sean Lennon (John Lennon's son) plays him in the English version and he does fine from what I've heard of him, but I'm too spoiled by the original French actor, haha. XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bpj1crAR0c (Here's the song he sings after we see his form for the first time. Sorry for the Spanish subtitles, but this is the closest to high quality of the French version I can find)

The highlight of the movie is when Francoeur (aka the Adorable Flea Monster) and Lucille share a duet together:

1968- Former master animator Bill Tytla’s request to return to Disney was turned down. The artist who animated Grumpy the Dwarf, Dumbo and the Devil on Bald Mountain even offered to do a free “trial animation test” to show he still had it. Disney exec W.H. Anderson wrote him:” We really have only enough animation for our present staff.” Tytla died later that year. (via Tom Sito)

"We had trouble because the fantastic animators we found had got really stressed because they thought after our film there was not going to be any 2D any more. Some were driving buses or retraining. People really had been made to believe that the end had come. The truth is that animation is always mixing things up: pen and paper, stop motion, puppets, 3D. Suddenly this bizarre competition has been created. What it is, one more time, is this American reflex to kill off the competition, to say that you can only do it one way and destroy everything else that went before. The whole society is like that. They destroy what they have to build something new. They end up with no roots to draw on, nothing to compare their work with to see if it is good or not. American culture is in real danger of starving itself to death. You just have to see what Hollywood is producing to see how narrow it is getting." - Sylvain Chomet (via Ben Price)